Bidding adieu to Pentium M

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Come on.

I have been reading through these posts, and I just have to say, come on. I mean I am not a fabricator, or even achip designer. Though Ilearned how to design microchips in school, I never even tried to get hired by Intel or AMD. Maybe, I wasn't good enough at it. I mean the shear amount of And and Nor gates that you have to etch into this wafer then etch into silicone. It's a shear wonder these things work at all. And, so many hear are getting personal over it. Does anyone hear design chips for a living. If you do not don't hype about the technology as if you had a first hand understanding. Screw the tech papers this is what is reported, and not always what is.

The fact is Intel leads the way for the consumer market. They take the chances, they get industry excited. If it wasn't for the whole Pentium branding they did back in '93 or so, the PC industry would not be what it is today. Did AMD have the funds to do this with the K5. No. I saw one K5 comercial, twice, and that was it. I saw 5 or so pentium comercials hundreds of times. That helped spark the industry. As fabrication got smaller, and the chips got cheaper, the prices came down. That was Intel. Now don't get me wrong I am a die hard AMD lover, and they did push the prices through the floor, but Intel started the big slide. Was it becuase of competiton. Of course it was. Both IBM and AMD were on there ass with product. But to most people a 4x86 was a 4x86. They didn't care who built the chip. Pentium is what gave that chip a name. Grante it was just a 5x86, but it was a lot easier to sell. More sales are good. This forces the comp. to get even more competitive. Cheaper prices for all.

Remember MMX. Intel put that out there. For those that do not know MMX is what brought digital enternainment home. DVD, Good AVI, MP3, full screen full motion video. They all owe their roots to MMX extensions. Yeah we video with AVI and Mpeg1 before then, but do you remember the quality and the jitering. MMX I loved it. Intel did that. AMD and Cyrix came with the next day. But, Intel put it out there. They took the chance, they did the bulk of the R&D. MMX was them.

Floating Point Unit. Intel again. What the hell do I need a great FPU for. Word doesn't really use it. The net didn't need it at all back then. Heavy number crunching, what ever. But, Intel said let's beef it up. Damn if a industry all of its own was not reborn after that. NVidia, ATI, and all you gaming junkies should bow to the Floating Point Gods, for giving Intel the forsight to kick that project into gear. AMD would have left it in the closet, if Intel had not stepped up. Cyrix , as much as I loved them, well they just stepped out.

Math CoProcessor. Um, were did it go. There was one every 4x86 worth buying. And how good was the one you had. I don't even remember how we rated those things. Thank Intel for that as well. They took thing and stuck it on the main processor, and called it the Pentium. Added a little cache and called it the Pentium Pro. Then took the Pent. Pro threw MMX on it and called it the PII. I think that's how it went. Where would we all be without our old PII's or K6's C6's. Maybe getting laid more often, but most likley still trying to squeeze 15mhz more out of a Pent.150. Instead of bragging how we cracked Sonys latest encryptin scheme. Or encoding that porn, for upload to the net. That fact is Intel figured that extra power was needed, and why waste space on the board with it. Again everyone else followed.

Cache. Need I say more. Imagine the bottle necks if it were not for full speed onboard cache. I hated this move at first. Then prices came down and the cache sizes went up. Hello, faster multitask.

Front Side Bus. What was wrong with 100mhz. That divides into almost everything easily. It's base 10, come on. But, SATA, PCI-X, EIDE. Imaging those squeaking along at 33 or 66. When your chip was pushing 3ghz down the pipe. Would that even work. The buses had to change they all knew it. Intel just did it first.

We can go on for days. The fact is Intel pushes it out to the public. Success or fail they are putting out there. AMD gets to sit back and get right. That's why there are less recalls. Granted x86 is an aging Dinosaur that should have been put out to pasture over 10 years ago. CISC is better , and Apple is a fool for leaving it, that is if they are leaving it, hmm. However it a RISC world and Intel put it here so thay have to take it ou But, um I cant design an istruction set, can you. So with that I say Come on!

AMD all the way of course. I'd rather go second and cheaper then be first and expensive.

Posted by: osbd   Posted on: 01/10/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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